


Mad Women

by Zara Hemla (zarahemla)



Category: Mad Men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-19
Updated: 2008-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:35:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1634270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zarahemla/pseuds/Zara%20Hemla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Whatever can come to a woman can come to me.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mad Women

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Ennorwen

 

 

This journey is exploring us.  
Where the child stood  
An island in a river of crisis, now  
The bridges bind us in symbol, the sea  
Is a bond, the sky reaches into our bodies.  
We pray: we dive into each other's eyes.  


Whatever can come to a woman can come to me. 

\-- Muriel Rukeyser  
"Waterlily Fire" (1962) 

01\. Peggy 

Peggy's new office is as neat as a pin: nothing is ever out of place. After meetings break up she spends an hour picking ash out of the carpet and smoothing out holes where the chairs were carelessly placed. She opens up windows to air out the smoke no matter how hot or cold it is outside. She tells housekeeping a dozen times to come with heavier cleaners; she can't get the stain out of the carpet where Freddy Rumsen puked up his retirement. Finally she lets it be -- a reminder, she tells herself. Not that she's going to become an alcoholic, but that it's the little things that finally build up and kill you.

Little things. Like her mother calling every Sunday afternoon, without fail, asking how is she and what's new at work and oh, did you go to Mass this week? Father Gill, he's been asking how you are. When are you coming for a visit? We could make that Jell-o salad you like, with the pineapples? Your sister misses you. We worry about you out there. Are you warm enough? Do you get enough sleep?

Peggy hates that Jell-o salad, but she's never told her mom. Just like she lies and says she went to Mass -- she hasn't been since last time she was home. She stays home on Sundays and reads novels or the newspaper; or she goes to museums and wanders around looking at modern art. Or she writes half-finished letters in her head to the baby that she gave away -- _it's better like this. You wouldn't have liked me. I'm not married. I'm not kind, not patient, not ready. I can't take care of you._

She goes out with Kurt. He takes her to places she'd never know existed: places that would make her mother run for the confession booth. She doesn't like it as much as she thinks she ought to, but it's better than sitting at home on a Saturday night. Once in awhile, she is one of six or seven women in a packed dance bar. They all find their way to each other and sit, smoking or trying to talk above the music, while around them a crowd of men dance or kiss or caress one another, defiantly oblivious to which of their number might be police officers. Sometimes Kurt disappears and Peggy finds her own way home. Sometimes he doesn't. 

"I like you, Peggy Olson," he says many times, slinging his arm around her. If he walks her home he is always loose-limbed, sauntering, gregarious. His non-work clothes are much tighter and he smiles and talks much more. Peggy smiles and talks back; she doesn't know why she likes him so much. He is obviously not interested in anything beyond talking, giving her advice on her hair or clothes, telling her to change her lipstick color. She knows that people in the office whisper about her. It's just a relief to have someone to talk to that isn't appraising her for value -- _can she bring in this campaign? Will she go out for sandwiches with me? Is she good in bed? Will she come back to God?_

During the week she ignores everything, everything else except how to make the next sale. Ignores the susurrus of gossip that follows before and after her. Ignores the fact that everyone thinks she slept with Don Draper to get the job; that women can't even do the job to begin with; that a lady wouldn't try to steal a man's job. It doesn't matter, because now she has the job -- and if God is watching over her, which she doubts these days, He can lump her in with the sparrows, because all of them are going to fly.

02\. Trudy

Everywhere, everywhere she goes, Trudy sees babies. Little crumply ones in baby slings; older ones in prams who give everyone they meet that serious, considering, nice-to-meet-you look. She hasn't walked through Central Park in months, though she used to love it, because she can't stand to see all those happy mothers playing with their children -- boys or girls, blonde hair or brown, dirty from running or gleamingly scrubbed by their adoring parent. Children laugh and talk and ask a million questions and eat dirt and give you hugs -- but she has to keep all those thoughts tamped down in her mind, keep them unthought. She stays home and polishes the furniture instead, dusting until the woodwork gleams and scrubbing the bathroom in yellow rubber gloves. She spends half the day cooking something delicious, something that will surely make her husband stay home this time instead of going out with the boys until all hours.

She doesn't want Pete in the house, but she does. Rather, she wants the Pete she thought he was before they were married, the kind Pete with the laughing eyes. The post-marriage Pete comes home frowning, never happy no matter what she cooks, how carefully she dresses. He isn't taken seriously at his job and his mother is putting some kind of pressure on him; she knows that. But still sometimes she thinks of walking up to a baby carriage and snatching the baby right out of it, and running off with him (or her) to her parents' house, and never seeing or speaking to Pete again. That's madness, of course, purest insanity, so she doesn't think those thoughts. 

When Pete comes home she serves him, wearing her best dress and making sure her makeup looks pretty. She listens to all his complaints, some of them about the dinner, and some of them about how Don Draper doesn't ever take him seriously. After dinner she and Pete watch TV, because Pete likes to criticize all the ads and talk about how Sterling Cooper could do better with its eyes shut. Then they go to bed. She has long ago stopped enjoying their bedroom sessions -- mostly because of post-marriage Pete, who does his quick duty with his head down and doesn't seem to mind that she doesn't care, so she stares at the dark ceiling until he has finished. When he gets his breath back, he rolls over onto his back. She is about to get up and wash herself when he speaks, and she can feel the malice in it like a black hammer. He always has to get in a few digs before he can sleep. She's used to it. She waits. 

"I had some news today, Trudy."

"Oh?" she says, wishing he'd just get done with it.

"Peggy Olson was telling me something very interesting. See, before I married you, I had a relationship with her. And she told me today that I got her pregnant. She gave it away, who knows where. But it was a boy, Trudy. Isn't that simply fascinating?"

Trudy doesn't reply, just gets up off the bed and goes into the washroom. She turns on the light, sponges off her thighs, feels Pete's words slide like a snake around her throat, choking her so hard that she can't do anything but stare into the mirror, into her own miserable gaze, while the thought boils up to the surface, over and over: _It's you. It's you. It's you. It's you._

03\. Joan

Three weeks after she was given a new angle by which to view Don Draper's office, Joan wakes up with a start into a frigid December morning. The heat is out again and her breath steams into the pre-dawn grey leaking through the curtains. Greg's arm lies like a deadweight over her hip; he is snoring softly into her hair. She wriggles out from under him, wincing as she hits the air, and Greg mutters something half-awake and annoyed. Joan says the first thing that comes to her mind.

"There's a morning meeting with London. I have to be there."

He says something else and rolls over again. His rounds had finished late at night and he had woken her up coming in; but for all that she has had almost no sleep, she feels like she can't stay in the bed, in the house (her own house!) another minute. Her feet feel like they're frozen to the floor; the window is rimed with frost; she tiptoes over to the bureau and feels for her girdle, then over to the closet. Her clothes are arranged by color and she knows which they are by the feel of them; the eggplant velvet jacket, the dark green tweed skirt, her cashmere sweaters and her many pairs of silk blouses. Some of the girls in the office come in wearing new factory-made fibers -- they call it polyester -- but Joan likes the feel of silk. 

She dresses in the half-light coming in through the kitchen window, but can't do her hair -- but it's so early no one will be in the office, she'll have time to fix it, she just needs a place to go and that's the only place she can think of. She had been dreaming, and in the dream Greg had put his hand over her face again but this time he had put it over her mouth, hard, and she had been sure that she was going to die. But here she is, alive and freezing, not daring to start the coffee machine because it might wake him up.

It's not a long commute from her place to the office, which is good because an office manager really ought to be in before all the other girls. They will be in later, straggling in fixing their hair, putting on lipstick, banging slush from their shoes. Joan placates them with everything they want (while trying to avoid them); they are a flock of biddies who spend every minute gossiping about something. Their three favorite topics are: why Pete Campbell came back without his boss, whether the merger will go through, and why Roger Sterling finally cracked and decided to marry his newest arm candy. Joan knows the answer to that last one: she'd seen the look in his eyes when he came back from that heart attack. Her first thought after seeing him was, _Finally_. It was only later, after a lot of foolish hoping, that she'd realized the look was not for her anymore.

Sterling Cooper's glass-fronted office is dark; even the cleaners have gone home. The heels of her Vivier pumps click on the marble flooring and she digs in her pocket for the key that Roger gave her aeons ago, when she'd thought he was in love with her. When she'd been stupid enough to think that he would leave his wife. The key still works, of course, and she lets herself in and locks up behind her. The cavernous main room, so busy and full of life during the day, is sleepy and quiet. Joan considers a quick nap on Don Draper's couch -- she is feeling tired again -- but rejects it. Being in there would force her to think about things that she'd rather not think about. She goes to the typewriter instead, meaning to finish up some of the correspondence that the new girl had left from the day before. Instead, she finds herself typing aimlessly on Sterling Cooper's fine linen stationery.

Dear Mr Cooper and Mr Sterling -- I regret to inform you that I will be tendering my resignation after two weeks. My fiance, you see, he says I shouldn't work anymore, now that I have him to support me. -- Dear Sterling Cooper -- I resign as of now, immediately, to become a housewife and spend more time with my loving husband -- spend more time with my dear new husband. I plan on having children and a mother should stay home with her children. Dear Sterling Cooper -- why wasn't I good enough for that copywriter job? What's so special about Peggy Olson? -- Dear Sterling Cooper -- what should I do? I don't know what to do. Yours truly, Joan Holloway.

04\. Betty

What a wildness can come when you quit pretending! Betty had never understood how much power she could have. She specialized in aloof beauty when she modeled; the Grecian goddess or the unapproachable princess or the glittering fairy queen. She married Don and became his showpiece, a visible symbol of his success. Thinking about it now, she isn't sure he ever loved her. Or even was capable of love. She mulls over all the nights he spent in the city, all the women he was probably with, and she thinks, _all those wasted nights at home_. All those wasted hours hoping that he was all right while he was working: all those times she wished she could go into the city and keep him company. _He probably got me pregnant so I'd have to stay home._

She knows she's exaggerating, that Don cared for the kids in his way. She knows she's not being fair to him. But the wound, once open, does not seem to want to stop bleeding. Betty has tried stopping it up many ways: riding didn't help, confessing it all to her best friend didn't help, and she doesn't dare tell her parents. Goddesses and queens don't fail. They don't make mistakes. They don't bleed. 

When Don had left and she'd immured herself in her house, she'd felt more and more bloodless, like she had ice water in her veins, like her brain was frozen and sluggish. And then she'd gone to the doctor, and gone to the bar, and seen the man there: and he had seen her. Really seen her -- she could feel the appreciation coming off him in waves. She'd acted the usual way, pulled the unapproachable princess routine, and he had left. But the blood had started to drum in her veins again and all she could think was, _I'm pregnant, I'm pregnant, I'm already pregnant_. So instead she had taken him into the back room, taken him, by herself, tasting the liquor on his breath and feeling his breath panting against her neck, feeling the excitement that could only come from something so forbidden, so antithetical. 

What he got from it, she doesn't even care -- whatever it is that men always got, an orgasm and a sense of self-satisfaction, probably. But what he had given her -- she feels like sending him flowers for it. Freedom. Freedom to act like her husband, to take any man she pleases simply because he's good-looking and giving her the glad eye. Freedom from caring so deeply what Don thinks of her, when it is obvious that he doesn't think of her at all. She wakes up the next morning and makes breakfast with the children, and then she goes riding again. When no one is looking, she swings herself down, takes off the saddle, and then tries riding bareback. Just for the fun of it.

\--end-- 

 


End file.
